Best Friends Forever (21 page)

She if you wanted. There’s always too much food.”

“It sounds like fun,” he managed. And it did: a big round table crowded with Hol y and her sisters and their husbands. And their kids. “Let’s see how things go with the case.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s a real crime.”

She smiled at him, clearly amused at the thought. “Deep-frying an innocent turkey. That’s a crime.”

“Keep me posted,” he said, and ducked into his office, where he yanked the bra out of his pocket and shoved it in the bottom of his desk drawer, underneath five years’

worth of performance evaluations and the two boxes of Girl Scout cookies he’d bought from Paula’s granddaughter the previous spring (he’d asked the girl whether the Samoas were made with real Samoans, and she’d looked puzzled, then upset, as she’d backed away

slowly

toward

her

grandmother’s desk). He set the bag of doughnuts Addie had given him on his blotter and pul ed out his notebook, flipping through it, considering the words that jumped out: vegan and walk-ins, Matthew

Sharp and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He ate another doughnut, feeling the sugar crystals crunch between his teeth, then googled Adelaide Downs. A handful of hits came up: her name on the Happy Hearts website, pictures of some china pieces that had been for sale three years ago.

Then there were the websites where everyone, even the most misanthropic hermit, showed up these days: Did you go to high school with ADELAIDE DOWNS? Are you ADELAIDE

DOWNS’S

friend? He clicked through the links, plugging in her name and address, hoping for a photograph (just so he could look at it and assure himself that she was nothing special). No picture showed up: just images of her greeting cards, a set of dessert plates, the spoon rest she’d mentioned. Jordan wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, picked up his phone, and dialed the number Addie had given him. Mr. Duncan, the Walgreens manager, put him on hold to check the time sheets and, a minute later, came back on the line, sounding apologetic.

“Jon was scheduled to work last night, but it doesn’t look like he showed up.”

Jordan thanked the man for his help, got to his feet, waved at Hol y, who was on the phone, fished a handful of chocolates from Paula’s bowl, and made his way back to his car.

Ten minutes later, he was on the corner of Main Street and Crescent Drive. He popped a kiss into his mouth and sat relaxed, his hands open on his legs, breathing steadily, eyes trained on the street. Five minutes later, an ancient green station wagon sagging on four half-flat tires came squealing around the corner. There was a blonde behind the wheel, another woman, with her head covered, in the passenger’s seat. The car stal ed, backfired once, belched a cloud of oily smoke, and puttered off toward downtown. Jon wouldn’t hurt a fly. We’l just see about that, he thought, and started off after the station wagon.

TWENTY-FOUR

“So what have you been up to I asked Val as we drove west. We’d been on the road

—on the lam, I corrected myself—for ten minutes, and Val had devoted most of them to complaining about the car. “This is a hooptie, isn’t it?” she’d final y asked, as we’d driven past the NOW LEAVING PLEASANT

RIDGE: A PLEASANT PLACE TO LIVE! sign.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“A beater. Crap on wheels. A death trap. A piece-of-shit car.” She sniffed. “Clearly you missed our series on urban slang.”

“Clearly.” I had to smile. Val looked like she’d just bitten into something rotten as she twisted back and forth, peering out her window to inspect the station wagon’s exterior. Final y, she gave a loud, displeased sigh. “Did something die in here?”

“My father,” I said, feeling guilty at enjoying the horrified look on her pretty face. “We had it cleaned after.”

She gasped. “You didn’t sel it?”

“It wasn’t the car’s fault,” I said. “It stil runs fine.”

Val snorted, slumping down as far as she could in the seat. “Hey,” she said after a minute. “Do you watch me?”

“Sometimes.”

I

could

feel

her

disappointment, as if the weather in the car had dipped ten degrees. “I’m hardly ever up that late.” I snuck a look sideways. Val’s forehead was furrowed, arms crossed over her chest, pouting. “I get the weather online,” I said. Val glared at me. I lifted my hands off the wheel and raised them, palms up, at the sky. “Everyone does! It’s very convenient! They up-date al the time.”

“That,” Valerie said, “is a myth. Online weather services use the exact same meteorolo-gical models that we do, so the idea that they’re giving you better information is just B.S.”

“Okay, but it is more convenient.”

She snorted. “Oh, like it’s such an imposition on your busy lifestyle to spend two minutes watching the news. Like you’ve got so much else going on. We do it at the top of the hour, you know. Right at the beginning of the newscast, so you can go to beddie-bye at eleven oh three.”

“Why would I watch the news when I can get the weather on my phone?” I asked.

“You know what’s wrong with America?”

Valerie asked. “There’s no loyalty. People watched the same channels for their entire lives. For entire generations! Grandparents and parents and children, al sitting around the TV

set, watching the on-air personalities. And now it’s al …” She raised her voice to a simper.

“‘Ooh, I can get the weather on my phone! I don’t need the MyFox Chicago News Team anymore!’”

Her mouth was contorted. “Hey. Take it easy,” I said.

Val slumped back into her seat. “It’s not just you. You know what the average age of a MyFox viewer is?” She paused. “Dead. Because everyone’s getting the weather on their phone or the news on their BlackBerry.”

She frowned. “And ever since we’ve gone to high def…” One hand rose to rub her cheek.

“I mean, it shows everything. Every line, every pore…it’s been a very stressful time for me.” I considered tel ing her it was probably an even more stressful time for Dan Swansea, wherever he was, but kept my mouth shut as we slipped into the passing lane. “You never got married?”

Valerie asked.

I never even had a boyfriend until this

year, I thought of saying. Instead, I just said,

“No.”

“Do you want kids?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I liked the idea of being a mother, but the reality of children wasn’t quite so sunny. A lot of them had pointed and laughed at me over the years. Stil , sometimes I thought I’d like a baby, and the friends that came along with babies. There was a coffee shop on Main Street downtown where I’d sometimes go on my way back from the post office. On Tuesday mornings a group of mothers with tiny babies and big strol ers would gather by the back door. They’d drink chai lattes and chat about their husbands or an article in the Times that said it was healthy for kids to eat dirt. Once, one of the women, a perky, skinny, ponytailed thing, had tried to whip up some interest in a baby sign-language class, and one of the other moms who was stil wearing maternity jeans nine months later (I’d spotted the tag when she’d bent over to grab an errant teething ring) had looked at her daughter, perched in a high chair, mashing a lump of banana into her forehead, and said, “I’m not sure she’s got anything to say that I’d be interested in hearing at this point in time.”

“So tel me what’s going on with you,” Val said. I wondered what I should tel her: how, at my heaviest, I’d order frosted cookies on the Internet, and every time I’d get them in a different tin—hanksgiving, Christmas, Happy Birthday, Fourth of July—so that whatever faceless person fil ing my order wouldn’t guess that I was eating five pounds of dessert by myself.

How, at my loneliest, I’d go to supermarkets when snowstorms were in the forecast, joining the crowds fighting their way toward the last dozen eggs or gal on of milk or rol of double-ply toilet paper, just so I could feel part of something. How, in the coffee shop, I’d watched the maternity-jeaned mother laughing at her little girl, the baby’s plump little palms slapping the wooden floor as she crawled and the other mothers murmured about splinters and germs, and thought, I could be

friends with her. Only I’d been too shy to say a word.

“Nothing much,” I said.

“You’ve got fancy underwear for nothing much,” Val observed.

I tightened my grip on the wheel. “I like nice things.”

“Sure,” said Val, sounding like she didn’t believe me for a minute.

We stopped at a gas station to fil the tank, and the tires, then at a convenience store, where I bought chips and sodas and a tuna-fish sub for my brother, and located what I had to guess was Chicago’s single remaining pay phone. I’d wanted to cal the Crossroads from home, but Val had decreed that any cal we made, from either our cel s or a landline, could be traced. Better safe

than sorry, I thought as Ms. Jennings gave me the news I’d been half expecting: Jon had gone wandering again.

“Bad news,” I said, climbing back in the car, where Val was touching up her makeup in the rearview mirror. “Jon took off.”

“So what do we do?” she asked.

I slid the key into the ignition and backed out of the parking space. “I know where to find him,” I said.

Forty-five minutes later, we left my father’s old car in a parking lot two blocks from the Art Institute, one of Jon’s favorite nonworking-hour hangouts. I pul ed on my hat and scarf and mittens. Val draped the coat I’d lent her over her shoulders and adjusted the fringed shawl that she’d tied over her hair, babushka style. “There,” she said, pul ing on oversized sunglasses. “I’m incognito.”

“Beautiful,” I said, and led her toward the sidewalk.

It took us half an hour to find my brother, sitting underneath an overpass a few blocks off of Michigan Avenue, with his back against a concrete piling and his eyes on the sky. His sleeping bag, my gift to him last Christmas, was pul ed up over his legs, and he’d tucked his hands inside to stay warm.

“Hi, Addie,” he said when I sat down beside him.

“Hi, Jon. How are you?”

“I’m good.” Think of this as a birth, one of the neurologists had told us after Jon had woken up from his coma, before he’d started to talk…and curse, and throw things. The person you knew is gone. This is a new

person. My father had turned away, his pale face white as the doctor’s lab coat, looking like he wanted to knock the horn-rimmed glasses right off the guy’s smug face, and my mother had wept softly into her hands. The new Jon, the one who had been alive now for longer than the old Jon, was shorttempered and forgetful, clumsy and occasional y frustrated, with flashes of his old, childlike sweetness glinting through like sunshine on water.

I sucked in a breath of the icy air. “You were at work last night, right?”

He thought for a minute, frowning, trying to remember. “There was a meteor shower. I wanted to see.”

My heart sank. No work meant no alibi.

“Oh, Jon.”

“But I cal ed in! Just like I’m supposed to. I cal ed in, and they said it was okay.” His forehead furrowed. “I’m sure. Almost. I think I cal ed.”

“I’m not angry.” I reached into my purse, handing him the things I’d packed: a hat and mittens, in case he’d forgotten his own (he had), a tube of ChapStick, in case his lips were chapped (they were). “Jon. I’m going to go away for a while. With Valerie. Remember my friend Valerie? We’re going on a trip.”

His eyes were stil fixed on the sun. “Are you going someplace warm?”

you going someplace warm?”

“I don’t know. Just…away for a few days. I want you to go back home. If you come with me, I’l give you a ride.”

“Can I go to the movies first? I promise I’l go back for dinner. And I’l go to work tonight.”

“Okay,”

I

said.

“Movie

first,

then

home.

And

listen, Jon, this is important. If anyone comes to ask you questions about where you were last night, you have to tel them the truth.”

His mouth hung open, and I could hear him breathe. “Addie,” he said. “I always tel the truth.”

“Okay.”

“Always.” He looked so serious. I gave him a quick hug.

“Okay.”

I sat beside him for a minute, feeling the chil y concrete against my back and the sunshine on my face. “Hey,” I said. “This isn’t so bad.” Jon tapped the back of my hand with two fingers. It was like being pecked by some smal , insistent bird.

“When you get there,” he said, “say hi to Mom from me, okay? Tel her I saw two total eclipses and one partial.”

“Oh, Jon.” It happened this way sometimes. We’d be having a perfectly normal conversation…or, at least, a conversation as close to normal as we could have—and then he’d say something that would remind me that nothing was normal, nothing at al . “Okay,” I said, instead of explaining, for maybe the mil ionth time, that our mother was dead. “I’l tel her.”

I helped him rol up his sleeping bag and walked him to the bus stop when he refused to let me give him a ride ( Jon loved to take the El and the buses, and the social workers had told my mother and me long ago that we should let him, that the more independent he became, the better off he’d be). I wrote down the number of the bus and the name of the theater, slipped him twenty dol ars and kissed his cheek. “I love you,” I said.

“Love you, too,” said Jon. Then I made my way back to Val, who was waiting on the sidewalk, watching us from behind her sunglasses. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” Back in the car, she curled up in the passenger’s seat, pul ing off her sweater and her scarf, making a little nest.

“Hey,” I said as she yawned and slipped off her shoes. “So where are we going?”

She raised her head. “Just drive south,”

she said. She closed her eyes and was instantly asleep.

TWENTY-FIVE

Jordan had stayed close to the station wagon, pul ing up to the curb when Addie drove in to a gas station, watching as she stopped at a convenience store, then at a pay phone, then a parking lot. He watched as the woman in the passenger’s seat with her head wrapped in a scarf freshened her lipstick in the rearview mirror, and Addie, who’d been driving, got out with a plastic grocery bag in her hand. He stayed a block or two behind them as they made their way along the sidewalk until Addie approached a man bundled in a sleeping bag, leaning against a concrete post beneath an overpass. Jordan had waited while she talked to him, gave him the bag, and walked him to a bus stop. Then, when she was gone, he shouldered his way through a few homeless guys up to the man, who was leaning against the glass of the enclosure with his sleeping bag tucked under his arm, staring calmly at the sky. Jordan said hel o, and when the man didn’t answer, he touched his shoulder.